One of the main reasons I have written this post is to share my experience and warn other fellow programmers. Please do NOT request other programmers in most USENET groups to review your article. You can get attacked.

Few weeks ago I have written a post which I think is a quality post, as a result I wanted to have a honest opinion and thoughts from other fellow programmers on USENET.

I didn't know that I will be abused and slashed into piece and my blog will be called a spam blog without even visiting it.

Below are the few remarks made on me and on my blog by some people on USENET group.I will not support advertisements for blogspam.scam sites.If you need an independent site that discusses Java rather comprehensively, goto xxxxx(I have removed the site address)

I mean how a person can call my blog a spam blog without even visiting it ?It looked like he was advertising his own xxxxxx website. Don't you think so ?

The main reason why Mr A and later Mr B might have pointed you toxxxxxx's site is because the information on the site s MOREcomprehensive, complete and correct than your blog...

But I only asked to review my post and my blog is not a tutorial website

Plonk, you thin-skinned, judgmental, condescending, sarcastic SOB. Why wouldanyone be interested in an article written by you ?Shame on you, troll.

I only asked the person not to call Asian countries as third world. I know its cold war term, but hey cold war is over so why use this slang ? (My point of view)

Your statements make it clear that you areattacking Mr A and me for allegedly spamming Mr B web site, only becausewe are getting in the way of you spamming your stupid little blogscam.scampost and advertising scam. Well, sorry to rain on your parade, bub, but youaren't getting rich off of these sheep.

So mush for asking their thought on my blog post. Honestly the only thing I requested was their thoughts on the post I have written and think it got quality in it.

Mr A's site is a good one, and the purpose of this newsgroup is to shareinformation that is useful and helpful to Java programmers. That meanssharing about xxxxx website and stopping spam/scammers like you fromperpetrating their little frauds.

Yes the purpose of the group is to share/help java programmers. That is the reason I have requested group for their thoughts

Well after that attack I decided not to contribute or request any help on that specific group. I will rather share my thoughts with the programmer community in DZone then any other rude groups.

Today VMware announced they have acquired SpringSource for a mix of approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options

SpringSource founder Rod Johnson said

"Working together with VMware we plan on creating a single, integrated, build-run-manage solution for the data center, private clouds, and public clouds. A solution that exploits knowledge of the application structure, and collaboration with middleware and management components, to ensure optimal efficiency and resiliency of the supporting virtual environment at deployment time and during runtime. A solution that will deliver a Platform as a Service (Paas) built around technologies that you already know, which can slash cost and complexity. A solution built around open, portable middleware technologies that can run on traditional Java EE application servers in a conventional data center and on Amazon EC2 and other elastic compute environments as well as on the VMware platform. "

VMware said ..."SpringSource has also been a technology innovator with a mission similar to us, but focused on the application-centric areas of IT rather than on the hardware-infrastructure focus that VMware is associated with. SpringSource’s obsession has been simplifying and automating the build-run-manage lifecycle that all applications go through, and they have done so by attacking similar pockets of complexity. They bring this complexity-busting focus to several areas… high-productivity developer tools and frameworks, lightweight application server runtimes, and application management and monitoring. The end goal is very similar; attack the time and money spent on application complexity and maintenance tasks, shifting the focus to new and more reliably deployed applications.

This shared mission is what brought us together in initial partnering efforts late last year. As a combined entity, the existing efforts and missions will continue, but we’ll also work to jointly sever a whole new collection of tentacles… the ones that unnaturally tie an application to the rigid way it must be deployed and managed."

In the blog post Johnson also notes that he expects SpringSource's contributions to open source to continue and increase. Steve Herrod, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D at VMware, has also commented on the acquisition.will continue to cover industry reactions as they become available...

Most of the programmers are busy people working on some kind of projects. Having a video tutorial can provide some quality time with learning but on the other hand reading tutorials can be fast all we do is skim the main points of the post and move on.

while I was discussing the topic with fellow programmer friends on twitter, USENET and online some interesting unanimous answers came out. So I thought why not share it with blog subscribers as well.

Below are the responses I got from my friends, and you are more then welcome to comment your thoughts on it.

Donkey HottieSome programmmers enjoy sausage, others more like sex. Old and tired dogsmay enjoy beer on their free time.

Martin Gregorie

Straight answer: I much prefer written material because:

1)the bandwidth of a talking head video or a powerpoint-type presentation is *much* lower than that of reading a text version of a tutorial at my own speed. As a result I'm wasting time watching a video when I could be reading it instead.

2)well laid-out written text is much easier to use as reference material.

Wojtek

Sitting at my desk listening to a droning voice puts me to sleep.

Most programming video tutorials are done by programmers. And we tendnot to be very exciting (ok, ok, "ducks").

You hear a bored voice and see a mouse cursor moving around:"And then you click here and this happenes, then you click there andthat happens, and you see this result."

Not sure how to liven this up, maybe a dance team in skimpy clothingillustrating actions? Some lithe young thing running around the screenmimicing a cursor?But please NO background music.

Dirk Bruere

Written.Better yet, a really good book on the topic with web based examples forreference

Arne Vajhøj

Written.Video has a "Learn to sell snow on the north pole andsand in Sahara in 7 days" aura.

Daniel Pitts

A video tutorial is all but useless for non-novice programmers. Thewritten word is far more efficient at imparting information. The mostvaluable learning tool a programmer can use is a complete example thatcan be played with, altered, and explained.

Arved Sandstrom

It sounds like a serious question, so I'll answer it seriously. Ipersonally cannot stand video tutorials, not with respect to softwaredevelopment. If I want to get a better idea how to tie a fishing fly, ordo a tuneup on an older style car, I can appreciate a video. But textwith images is much more efficient at delivering information aboutsoftware development than a video could ever be.

I must confess: the whole concept of programming videos strikes me as sowrong that I've never watched one, and I doubt I ever will. :-)

"Like lots of you, we've been drawn into Twitter this year. After all, we're all about frequent updates ourselves, and there's lots happening around here that we want to share with you. Of course, we enjoy watching, and contributing to, the tweetstream (we hope you find our tweets useful, too). Because there are many programs and initiatives across the company, we've got a number of active accounts. Here's a list of the current ones. We'll update this list from time to time."

While I was discussing with a few programmer friends who have subscribed to my blog, a really creative idea comes out from our discussion and I am proud of that.

Discussion are important and allows programmers to expand their knowledge. They are like distributed computing, many brain works together on a topic hence Volla!!! a creative result.

Don't we agree that its a world of Ajax ? Gone were the days when for every HTTP request a page refresh is required.

Ajax allow programmers to provide user friendly and desktop like experience. Google has contributed many efforts into web based applications, which provides desktop like functionality example Google Doc, spreadsheet, gmail etc.
A part google contribution they have created Google gears, which is getting popular between many vendors even wordpress (one of the biggest bloggging platform) now uses google gear to speed up the user interaction.

Talking about Ajax and Web 2.0 based rich (business)application I have also written couple of well known articles on it as well

Ok, like I said before when me and my fellow subscribers were discussing about Ajax, google gear and java. We decided to find out the alternate of google gears because we all are java programmers and gear api is in javascript and java is more powerful then javascript as well (thats my love for java) :P

So lets dive into the anatomy of Google gears and show you how java can replace google gear.....Ready ?

Google gears have three main component mentioned below

1) LocalServer

2) Database

3) WorkerPool

LocalServer caches and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally.The localServer module is a specialized URL cache that the web application controls. Requests for URLs in the LocalServer's cache are intercepted and served locally from the user's disk

Database Store stores data locally in a fully-searchable relational database. It is used to persistently store an application user's data on the user's compute

WorkerPool make web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously (a.k.a provides threading like functionality though they are not threads).The WorkerPool API runs operations in the background, without blocking the UI. Scripts executing in the WorkerPool will not trigger the browser's "unresponsive script" dialog.

After discussion what we found out is mentioned belowWe all know about applets right ? We will use java applet as a service provider for all three functionalities which google gear provides. Yes Sir, applets are not all about GUI, they can be used headless.

With the help of integration between javascript and java we will achieve this kind of functionality

Alternate of LocalServer in java lets call it javaLocalServer:

javaLocalServer can cache and serve application resource, it will depend upon how developers are going to store it, for example developers can cache resources in HashMap or in a DB.For every request to any resource javascripts will call java function which will search resource locally and if not found then it will fetch from network.

Alternate of Database Store in java lets call it javaDatabaseStore :

For this we choose Java DB a.k.a apache derby. Sun has already announced Java DB is included in the Java SE Development Kit from java 1.6 onward though I am not sure about the version.

Users with old version of java can download derby(which is very small in size) through web application. Now we got full database functionality on client side which provides way more features then google Database store

Alternate of WorkerPool in java lets call it javaWorkerPool :

In google gear workerpool provide asynchronous functionality to web based client, which can be achievable through java threads.

Through javascript integration with java, web developers can call functions of java classes and start a thread for time consuming process.

Now all we need is to sign the applet so that database can write on disk and up we go.